Console Do Not Track (DNT)

A proposed unified standard for opting out of telemetry for TUI/console apps.

Gatsby has GATSBY_TELEMETRY_DISABLED. Homebrew has HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS. Syncthing has STNOUPGRADE, a config file setting for disabling crash reporting, and a GUI prompt for usage reporting. Google Cloud SDK CLI tools has gcloud config set disable_usage_reporting true. .NET Core has DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT. Netlify’s CLI has netlify --telemetry-disable. The AWS Serverless Application Model CLI has SAM_CLI_TELEMETRY=0. The Microsoft Azure CLI has AZURE_CORE_COLLECT_TELEMETRY=0. You get the idea.

This is a proposal for a single, standard environment variable that plainly and unambiguously expresses LACK OF CONSENT by a user of that software to any of the following:

ad tracking

usage reporting, anonymous or not

automatic update phone-home

crash reporting

non-essential-to-functionality requests of any kind to the creator of the software or other tracking services

We just want local software, and by providing it to us you are not entitled to our usage, our crashes, or our IP addresses.

Remember: in the right hands, an IP address is a physical location. If you would not collect your users’ GPS coordinates against their wishes, you should not be collecting their IP addresses against their wishes!

Authors, do the ethical thing and respect the following environment variable in your software and your limited rights to the computers of your users: